Companies are Listening

Companies are listening to what you have to say about them in the world wide web. In my previous post, “I Failed the Xdrive Security Check“, I posted about my experience struggling to get pass the security check when I was registering for Xdrive. Xdrive was listening and posted a comment on that blog post.

Xdrive was nice enough to contact me about my problem and this is what they had to say:

“Hi Michael –

I wanted to thank you for trying out the Xdrive product, and for your persistence in working through a rather difficult CAPTCHA to complete your registration. All of us on the Xdrive team have felt that our security challenge can be far too difficult to recognize at times, and we’re actively working on a new registration flow that *does* allow the user to request a new set of images when they run into this particular problem. The new system should be in place in early/mid June.

Now that you’ve made it through the registration, I hope that you and your colleagues find that the Xdrive family of products meet all of your online storage needs.

Cheers,
The Xdrive Product Team”

To the Xdrive Product Team I appreciate the time and effort put into contacting me by commenting on my blog. It’s good to know that companies are listening to what people have to say and in this situation Xdrive does recognize that there is a problem.

This is my first time having an experience like this after writing about a problem that I experienced with a companies service, but Adam has had two other occasions when this has happened to him with Feed Burner and Paypal.

Knowing what people are saying over the internet about their company can be very valuable information to better your business and make your customers happy. I know one simple way to see what people are saying about your company on the internet and it’s through Google Alerts. Enter a search term and fill in some other criteria and enter an email address then you’ll receive email notifications of Google’s latest web results for what you entered.

Simply signing up for some alerts, you can be in the loop on what people are saying about your company on the net. Listen to the net and you might detect a problem early or jump on a new opportunity.

Xdrive thank you for listening.

I Failed the Xdrive Security Check

I have a funny and frustrating story to tell you about with my experience with Xdrive. Xdrive offers free online storage and our company is making the move to be completely web based, so we all signed up for 5 free gigs of storage. I would have to say I’ve had good amount of internet experience signing up and registering for different sites and I’m pretty sure this is the first time that I failed.

Everything was going smoothly until the security check, which I couldn’t pass. I tried numerous times and just couldn’t get the characters correct. Then I tried to listen to the characters and all I got was beep. Frustration starts to set in, so I started the registration process all over. What is the deal AOL, which owns Xdrive, with not offering a different character image. There was one character in the security check that I just couldn’t figure out. I took a screen shot of the security check, check out for yourself.

What could it be?

• COHSJGXR
• COHS6GXR
• COHSIGXR
• COHbGXR
• COItJGXR
• Maybe the O is a Zero

I tried all sorts of combinations of characters and none were successful. What the frick is that character? I don’t know what that character is. Anyways that little character caused me a lot of mental anguish. I failed the security check and I had to do the registration process all over again. I did not have a pleasant experience with that security check, especially because they didn’t give me a new character image that would be more readable so I could finish my registration.

AOL please offer new character images, so users can start using your services quicker just in case they can’t read some of your wack security check images.

Update 7/27/2008

Many other’s continue to be frustrated with the Xdrive experience here is another image of a security check gone wrong submitted by a someone who commented on this post.